Ask any group of enterprise IT managers why they migrated to the cloud and most of them – if not all – will cite cost-savings. The cloud represents a new standard for enterprise applications, with Forbes reporting that 70% of all organizations have at least one app in the cloud as of late 2016. 90% of all organizations today are plan on running apps in the next few years.

The picture is clear: clouds save businesses money. However, although the cost-savings may be readily apparent when comparing cloud services to on-premises infrastructure, how do cloud providers match up with one another? What should customers look out for beyond the standard monthly subscription price?

Introducing Egress Fees

Most cloud service providers discriminate between various types of data transfer. Just like an international call costs more than a domestic one, so too does transferring data from your cloud to some far-off external destination. The fees for transferring data outside your cloud network are called data egress fees.

Data egress is the opposite of data ingress – transferring data from within your cloud to a destination also within your cloud – and most providers don't charge for ingress, but place a premium on egress.

For example, Google charges $.12 per GB for the first terabyte of data egress towards most destinations outside its servers. Amazon charges $.09 per GB for the first 10 TB of data egress. It's easy to see that any business relying on large transfers of data can quickly find itself overwhelmed with fees.